Then the PR rep said, “No, this IS a book for older kids,” and the deal was sealed.

I couldn’t wait. It arrived just in time for me to hide away for a week and spring it on my 6 1/2 year old son (a very good, but reluctant, reader) for a surprise for his activity bag on our vacation.

He spent a good while paging through this book, taking in all the pictures and words and jokes. There’s nothing like a new book to help the goal of quiet contentment on a plane ride.

It’s format is like a thick magazine, with a soft semi-sturdy cover. Its size, 8 x 10, makes it big enough to have appealing pages with lots of things going on for the eye to follow, and yet it’s small and light enough to easily be carried around.

And what’s inside is even better. The cover blurb gives the tone that is found throughout the book, which is typical Boynton ramped up for an older audience. The contents are diverse and perfect for the kind of reading/browsing that my son loves to do. It has “Two Cow Stories! Three Cow Poems! Eleven or So Cow Jokes! One Cow Myth! One Cow Comic Book! Find the Hidden Cows! Way too Many Unexplained Chickens!”

The cover said it’s recommended for “all ages up to a hundred and moo” and I can see that too. My 1st grader liked it, but honestly I think it’s more on the level of 8 – 10 year-olds in humor and some of the vocabulary (which just means that if we put it away for a while when he grows tired of it, it will be great to bring out in a couple of years!). An older child who is into silly humor or loves cows will love having this book in their collection.

I’m adding this to our 5-Star Reads list. I will admit my Boynton bias, and perhaps it earned 3/4 of a star simply because of nostalgia from the days when my kids were Boynton board book readers, but it is a book that we’ve truly enjoyed, and this type of book is the kind that my son wants to have around, and that makes a mom’s heart happy.

Jennifer Donovan would have bought this book for her cow-loving college roommate (who finally had to tell people “enough already with the cow stuff!” after she got married). She (Jennifer, not the cow-loving roommate) blogs at Snapshot.

My four-year-old wanted us to get this, and we did because I love all things Boynton! Much of it is over his head, but he still loves the stuff he *does* get and he likes all the illustrations. It’s a hit with all of us, I think.